Cloud became the bedrock for businesses in 2020. While organizations – from governments to enterprises to startups – were already innovating and transforming using cloud, migrating to the cloud is now inevitable. The pandemic has taught us that no business is 100% resilient. However, those fortified by digital are more agile, more resilient, and more capable of transforming when faced with a crisis.
As businesses shift priorities to enable remote work, leverage cloud innovation, and maximize their existing on-premises investments, 2021 seems like a big year for cloud.
In the year ahead, every organization and every industry will increasingly need to ramp up tech intensity as speed, agility, and collaboration become more important than ever. Flexibility and future-proof strategies for seamless communication and workforce productivity are a must; and having an always-on cloud-driven data platform will be fundamental.
We will also see a new generation of Software as a Service (SaaS) emerge as businesses increasingly use it for shorter turnaround time for products and services, automation of back-end tasks for effective resource allocation, and stronger customer engagement.
The promise of AI is a holistic transformation. Layered with AI, cloud services are making organizations more efficient, strategic, and data driven. Together they offer not just agility, scalability, and cost savings, but also the ability to analyze and unlock insights from data; better predictive capabilities. This enables real-time decisions, smoother workflows, increased resilience, and better customer experiences.
Financial services providers are using AI and analytics services, enabled by cloud, at scale to reduce the cost of onboarding and assessing customers. Cloud and AI are helping banks speed up decisions with rapid risk analysis, and are enabling their employees to make quicker, more informed decisions for their clients. Other areas of transformation include automated credit and risk assessment of customers, automated claims processing using video and image analytics, faster restructuring of loans using advanced analytics.
AI is enhancing existing processes in banks, helping amalgamate and reduce process breaks. E.g. OCR and Speech analytics are being used for automatically filling application forms; video is being deployed to automate KYC; and BOTs are servicing customers at scale and reducing call center loads. Most of these AI solutions use pre-trained models and services already available on cloud and can be productized easily via customer specific training to accelerate adoption. These, and features such as e-digital payments & lending powered by cloud and AI, have also brought banks closer to customers than ever before.
Cloud and AI not only are accelerating digital transformation of banks but are genuinely helping in expanding their business reach and agility and automatically will start showing positive impact to their bottom line. AI and SaaS integration plays a key role in facilitating quicker technology adoption by eliminating the challenges in deploying, operating and maintaining complex IT systems. We are seeing a rise in the number of SaaS players with adoption taking off in verticals like finance, healthcare and education. Organizations using SaaS can deploy AI capabilities end-to-end without additional investment in infrastructure. SaaS’ pay-as-you-go nature also helps in driving cost efficiencies.
AI-driven SaaS chatbots converse with customers proactively and assist them with their requirements and issues. AI tools can also crunch customer data to gain insight into their behavior, predict trends, and plan service offerings accordingly. AI capabilities extend to areas such as email, collaboration and calendaring; and sophisticated business applications and document management. Moreover, AI in SaaS ensures seamless security of apps and organizational data.
The BFSI sector has been a frontrunner in adopting AI and cloud capabilities for improving productivity and enabling faster time-to-market with new products and services. This is evident in the expedition of digital banking in India’s financial services sector in the past few years, and more so in the last several months.
The convergence of AI integrated cloud services will empower BFSI companies to reimagine their business from front-end to back-end, making financial services more accessible than before. However, they’ll need to have a clear and long-term vision on what they intend to achieve with technology. And the strategy must be grounded in trust and responsibility. Clear principles must be adopted in developing and deploying AI ethically, ensuring that AI systems are fair, reliable and safe, private and secure, inclusive, transparent, and accountable.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by TTE staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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